Book Reviews

Historical Identities and Experiences

EDITED BY JESSIE L. EMBRYAND BRIAN Q. CANNON

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015. viii + 485 pp.Paper, $29.00

This volume of essays originating in the Charles Redd Center summer seminar of 2011 offers an introduction to ongoing themes and approaches in immigration and ethnic historiography in the West. An ambitious effort to survey ongoing research in the field, Immigrants in the Far West does acknowledge the limits to its approach, stating that the contributions “address significant questions and illuminate key facts of the immigrant experience but do not offer a complete overview of western immigration” (17). Nevertheless, the editors do seek to include scholarship that represents diverse disciplinary, ethno-racial, regional, and experiential histories. In essence, the volume provides a competent overview of recent research trends in ethnic, immigrant, and western history that may acquaint upper undergraduate, graduate, and lay audiences to contemporary historiographical trends.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of this work is its summary of historiography, especially in the introduction and prefatory comments to Parts One, “Who We Were and Who They Thought We Should Be,” and two, “What We Came For and What We Made of It.” Not only do the editors identify the contributions of scholars such as David Roediger, Alejandro Portes, Min Zhou, and Hasia Diner to the fields of ethnic and immigration history, but they also highlight seminal works examining ethnicity and immigration in the West, ranging from the work of Frederick Luebke to David Emmons, including Elliot Barkan’s From All Points: America’s Immigrant West, 1870s–1952 (2007).

The first seven essays are bundled in a section that examines identity, focusing on “the importance of local context, immigrant agency, legislation, and activism in shaping and contesting identity” (44). Diverse European, Latino, and Asian peoples within geographical areas including the Pacific, desert, and mountain Wests are discussed. The construction of identity as part of the Mexican immigrant experience is examined in three very different essays. Brett Garcia Myhren considers how immigrants and colonists interpreted the nature and meaning of Mexican California prior to 1841; D. Seth Horton employs textual criticism of Francisco Madero’s La sucesión presidencial en 1910 and two post-revolutionary novels to study immigration; and Anne M. Martinez writes about institutional efforts to shore up the Catholicism of Mexicans in the West. Eileen V. Wallis’s inclusive article looks at public education and Americanization campaigns, while Katherine Benton-Cohen and Matthew Basso comment on issues of race and immigration with the Dillingham Commission and in Montana’s copper communities, respectively. An intriguing narrative and one of possibly particular interest to those studying Utah and LDS history is Ryan Dearinger’s study of labor and the building of the transcontinental railroad. Viewing race, religion, class, and nationality as central to identity construction, Dearinger argues that for Mormons work on the railroad afforded “the chance of national acceptance . . . [as well as] a renewed sense of cultural superiority”(112).

Put simply, Part Two examines the traditional bookends of immigration study: push and pull factors. As previously mentioned, the editors provide a useful introductory survey of historiography, but they also include short biographies of individuals that personalize the immigrant experience. Possibly for idiosyncratic reasons, I was most engaged by Michelle A. Charest’s fusion of textual analysis and historical archaeology to explore the various uses and community meanings for the saloon in Irish communities in the mining West. Two studies in particular—Karen S. Wilson’s examination of community building by Los Angeles Jews and Andrew Offenburger’s study of the colonization of Boers along the U.S.– Mexico border—feature histories of immigrant peoples in new geographical settings. Other essays by Mindi Sitterud-McCluskey, Mark I. Choate, J. Matthew Shumway, and Jessie L. Embry and Meisha Slight focus on Mormon colliers, Italians, and Latinos.

As with most essay collections, Immigrants in the Far West functions best as a survey of current and ongoing research. This volume does a particularly good job in introducing the reader to historiographical traditions in racial, ethnic, immigration, and western studies and does so while accommodating contributions from other disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. At first glance the table of contents may appear to be inordinately weighted in favor of histories of the Mormon and mining West, but a closer look at the text allows the reader to comprehend the greater inclusivity of groups and universality of themes that the underlying organizational structure of the text provides. While I would have preferred greater discussion of Asian immigration, ethnoclass relations, and late-twentieth and twentyfirst century histories, I found the work quite satisfactory and worth the efforts of readers seeking an informative introduction to the historical fields covered.

— TIMOTHY DEAN DRAPER Waubonsee Community College, Illinois

Gateway to a Continent

BY WILL BAGLEY

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. 325 pp. Cloth,$29.95

Will Bagley’s latest book, South Pass: Gateway to a Continent, nicely elucidates René Dubos’s idea of the “genius of the place.” A scientist and environmentalist, Dubos wrote about the set of attributes—physical, biological, social, and historical—that makes a place different from all others. 1 Located south of the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, South Pass is such a place. It is a high, treeless valley that countless numbers of people have utilized to cross the Rocky Mountains. Bagley, the author of two books on the Oregon and California trails, describes South Pass as “the gateway to a continent” (15). In ten chapters, he outlines why this is true.

Focusing on the initial Euro-Americans who traversed South Pass, the first three chapters depict fur traders who first traveled through the pass after 1812. These chapters detail the role of the Astorians; the exploits of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company; the experiences of men such as Robert Stuart, Andrew Henry, James Clyman, and Jedediah Smith; and the rendezvous. The lasting legacy of the fur trade was the new knowledge it produced of the geography of the American West. Many of the fur traders became guides for the emigrant caravans that began to cross the plains in the 1840s, following in the footsteps of Benjamin Bonneville, the first to drive wagons over the pass.

The next five chapters address the topic of overland migration. Missionaries, including the first white woman to cross the pass, traveled west in the late 1830s. Between 1840 and 1870 more than a half-million Americans traveled through South Pass to destinations in the West. Bagley includes accounts of the 1849 gold rush to California, the Mormon handcart parties, and the development of shortcuts such as the Lander Cutoff to make for a quicker journey. One colorful chapter depicts tales of the Pony Express crossing the pass and its eventual replacement by the telegraph. Additional information explains how the Civil War impacted the region through the removal of troops from western forts, which then allowed frequent Indian attacks on the telegraph wires. The final chapter recounts the 1867 gold rush to South Pass and the experiences of the final wagon trains that traversed the region.

Bagley writes in the preface that South Pass belongs to the American people and ought to be protected as a significant historical site for future generations. In 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower designated South Pass a National Historic Landmark; it is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Nonetheless, the region is not immune from threat of destruction that might result from the building of a natural gas pipeline.

South Pass is a rugged landscape that yet inspires visitors, just as it did early pioneers. Standing there today is not much different than it was in the 1840s. Bagley quotes Wyoming native Tom Bell, “‘I can stand on South Pass and close my eyes, and hear the hoof beats of the Pony Express riders, the cracking of ox-team drivers’ whips, the creak of wagon wheels, the voices of women and children. South Pass is one of the few places where you can stand in 2006 and 1846 at the same time’” (294).

This well-written and extensively researched volume surely will apprise readers of the characteristics and history of South Pass and shine a light on the genius of this place.

— PATRICIA ANN OWENS Lawrenceville, Illinois

1 René Jules Dubos, “The Genius of the Place, Tenth Horace M. Albright Conservation Lectureship, University of California at Berkeley, School of Forestry and Conservation, February 26, 1970.

BY KENNETH R. BEESLEY ANDDIRK ELZINGA

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015. x + 161 pp.Paper, $19.95

Probably everyone who reads this review— regardless of denominational affiliation—has experienced the following: whether on a crowded street in the middle of a city, on the backroads of some hinterland, or in a foreign country, you spy from a distance two young men in white shirts with black name tags and assume they are Mormon missionaries. Those visual elements are two of three distinctive hallmarks of the missionary program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The third quality is less visible: teaching in the language of the people they are called to serve. Brigham Young, in his day, taught the missionaries he sent to Native Americans that this was the only way to achieve success. After counseling select individuals that they were not to worry about building personal wealth or helping white men, he said, “save the red ones [men], learn their language, and you can do this more effectively by living among them as well as by writing down a list of words, go with them where they go, live with them and when they rest let them live with you, feed them, clothe them and teach them as you can, and being thus with you all the time, you will soon be able to teach them in their own language” (46).

That is exactly what a group of seven men, led by Jacob Hamblin, attempted in the winter of 1859–1860 during the second of fifteen missions to the Hopis between 1858 and 1873. Following a short stay, Hamblin departed with four of the missionaries, leaving Marion Jackson Shelton and Thales Hastings Haskell—two men gifted with linguistic ability—behind to record the Hopi language in a phonetic system called the Deseret Alphabet. The ultimate goal was to eventually translate and write the Book of Mormon in the Indians’ tongue. The people of Orayvi (Oraibi) on Third Mesa in northern Arizona welcomed Shelton and Haskell, but these two men were also very much on their own for food and maintenance, which at times proved to be a struggle. No white shirts and name tags here. For four months, they lived among the people recording their language and developing a 486-word dictionary using the forty symbols of the Deseret Alphabet, just as linguists today use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This earlier system appeared around 1853, underwent a number of revisions, then fell into disuse by 1875. Shelton and Haskell’s work provided one of the best and most complete examples of its application to Native American languages. At the end of this four-month experience, Shelton felt he had failed to teach the Hopis the alphabet because they were constantly involved with dances and ceremonial activity—the winter is the height of important ritual performance. Haskell, undaunted, returned during the winter of 1862–1863 for a second visit, but there was no further work on the dictionary.

Beesley and Elzinga, two linguists, have written a work that operates on two levels. The first third is nonlinguistic contextual background, discussing the missionaries and missions, different types of phonetic alphabets, and correspondence written between church leaders and Shelton. The remaining two-thirds of this book rests in the domain of linguistics with a discussion of the Hopi language, issues specific to it, and a complete reproduction of the English-Hopi dictionary with transcriptions in both the Deseret Alphabet and IPA. I have consulted a Uto-Aztecan linguist who was reading the book at the same time and found that he was delighted at the insight these two authors provide. On the other hand, for a historian to read “it is reasonable to assume that he [Shelton] heard the prevocalic /r/ in 1860 Orayvi as rhotic and probably nonsibilant, while he heard the /r/ in syllable-final position as something definitely sibilant, probably [ș]. The prevocalic /r/s of his informants may have been nonsibilant voiced fricatives” gives pause. The point: there is something here for both camps— those interested in a historic literary mission to the Hopi as well as the linguistic side of what these men preserved by using the Deseret Alphabet. The book is an interesting piece of scholarship.

— ROBERT S. MCPHERSON USU Eastern, Blanding

Amy Brown Lyman and Mormon Women’s Activism, 1872–1959

BY DAVE HALL

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015. 266 pp. Cloth,$34.95

Amy Brown Lyman was a captivating and ambitious woman whose activism and achievements should rank her as one of the most accomplished historical figures in twentieth-century Utah. In A Faded Legacy: Amy Brown Lyman and Mormon Women’s Activism, 1872–1959, Dave Hall examines why today, “Lyman is all but forgotten among her own people and rates not even a footnote outside the Latter-day Saint community” (xi). The fortitude, fiscal responsibility, and faith demonstrated by Lyman in the service to her church and community through two world wars, the Great Depression, and multiple personal tragedies earns her a place of study in a manner that transcends traditional gender or religious study frameworks.

Hall illustrates the political and religious climate that facilitated acute and comprehensive activism by the women of Lyman’s generation. Her rural upbringing, with its strong focus on religion and education combined with extensive experience in the reality of childbirth-related death and illness (including her mother’s resulting disability and the deaths of two sisters) to provide Lyman with a strong foundation for her efforts later in life. Hall affirms that Lyman’s concerns about marriage and childbirth stemmed from these memories, as she acknowledged in a letter to a friend, “I want to see and hear a few more things before I sink into oblivion” (38). Subsequent travels east, including time spent at Jane Addams’s Hull House, exposed Lyman to practices of scientific social work she would successfully implement in Utah.

A Faded Legacy examines the role Lyman played in modernizing the Relief Society (the LDS organization for women), including updating record keeping and business practices, which led to the efficient distribution of charity and increased the number of young women involved. Hall illustrates Lyman’s management style as tough and demanding, “Her employees often expressed not just admiration, but real affection for her, explained in large measure because of the unbridled concern she showed for them and for their personal development.” He explains, “She used her unusual powers of perception to sense their needs and potential” (81).

The post–World War I years found Lyman adding the state legislature to her list of accomplishments, successfully advocating for the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act, providing the maternal and infant care that would significantly decrease mortality rates in the years following its passage. Hall writes, “As Utah continued its move from national pariah (religion), it now became something of a national model” for maternal and infant health (97). Hall also illustrates Amy’s “dynamic involvement” in the establishment of the Utah State Training School, postulating that “Lyman no doubt took great satisfaction in the success of the Training School legislation. Although she did not know it at the time, it represented one of the last organized forays by Relief Society women into the political process” (111).

Lyman worked to increase relief efforts during the Great Depression, but economic conditions worsened and there was a change in LDS church leadership. Hall explains the “national trends whereby those with long years of experience in relief matters—most often women— were shunted aside from new loci of power in dramatically expanded public agencies, while new figures—generally men informed less by practical experience than by political and ideological concerns—took their place” (124).

A Faded Legacy follows Amy Lyman and her husband Richard R. Lyman on their LDS mission to Europe, where Amy’s tenacity and devotion to the church and welfare work strengthened her resolve to improve the social and economic situation at home. Her time as Relief Society president should have cemented her legacy of activism and church loyalty. Instead, Hall posits what would have happened if Richard had not been excommunicated, effectively ending Amy’s tenure as president. While members of the LDS faithful will find much to enjoy in this biographical account, those outside of the LDS church will be equally intrigued by the questions arising from what happens when a woman’s accomplishments are overshadowed by a husband’s indiscretions.

Hall seeks to reestablish the memory of Lyman and other women of her generation. He writes, “Pursuing a path that at times intersected, sometimes diverged, and, at other times, paralleled that followed by other American women, these children of polygamy left behind an impressive record of accomplishments that resulted in remarkable benefits for themselves and subsequent generations” (9). While explanations of church hierarchy are muted, they are nonetheless critical to understanding the myriad of power struggles and personalities faced by Lyman. Her life spans from polygamous, pre-statehood days to homesteading and legislating, from a time when Progressive women helped to shape the American political landscape to the post–World War II era when LDS women were encouraged to be good wives and homemakers. A Faded Legacy is a fascinating case study of a woman who navigated several spheres with intermittent peace and frequent turbulence, and it is a solid text for any gender studies curriculum.

— JENNIFER RUST Utah State University

A Cartographic History of Mormonism

BY RICHARD FRANCAVIGLIA

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015. xv + 264 pp.Cloth, $34.95

Few authors bring such authority and experience to a formal study of map history as Richard Francaviglia, especially when the matter at hand is delivering a close reading of Mormon cartographic accomplishment. This sizable and quite hefty volume, handsomely prepared and illustrated with over one hundred fullcolor images, manages to do exactly what Francaviglia promises to do, revealing how “maps can serve religion in metaphorical as well as practical ways” (20). In a book dense with small type, the author estimates that there are better than 120,000 words describing the evolving geographical presence on the land of adherents of Mormonism (and non-LDS outsiders) and the ways that maps define human aspirations, journeys, settlements, and expansion over the course of two hundred years, going back to upstate New York. There, of course, Joseph Smith took the early steps in founding a religion whose followers are now officially known as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, though still widely referred to today as Mormons.

Francaviglia’s publications about aspects of built or vernacular culture on the Mormon landscape date back to 1969; for seventeen years, until his retirement in 2008, he was director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography at the University of Texas at Arlington. Clearly this is a scholar who brings a lifelong seriousness to studies of Mormons and Utah and who is capable of assessing how that American-born religious movement served to inspire and sometimes alarm its beholders. Mapping is not only a serious business for travelers and cartographers, it is an indication—as Francaviglia points out often and accurately—of the attitudes and beliefs of those who create maps and plans. While few of the materials included in Mapmakers of New Zion are the interpretive thematic maps that geographers or accomplished graphic artists create to expose and explicate a body of data, the volume does reproduce maps aplenty from many a source.

It is, therefore, particularly noteworthy that a main theme in this book are the cartographic “historical originals” that Mormons themselves generated, as their influence expanded from New York to Ohio and Illinois, and, after the migration across the Great Plains, to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake (239). This is, therefore, as much a study of evolving Mormon ideology and practical experience as it is an examination of maps. Many of the most interesting maps, Francaviglia notes, were long held within the LDS church archives and, because they sometimes brought forth inconvenient truths, were not always featured in atlases of Zion, Deseret, and the Utah Territory. He aims for a less partial view and largely pulls it off.

From the days of Joseph Smith onward, Mormon leaders have been careful students of maps, which loom large in church history. This book sees no need to confine itself to published maps from that history: there are rarely seen and well-reproduced manuscript maps, paintings, and photographs of map-quilts, brochures, panoramas from the Salt Lake City airport, and a map showing “Church Missions Worldwide.” Handsome photographs of the LDS Church Office Building—which is familiar to anyone who has walked near Temple Square in Salt Lake City—display the building’s sensible adornment with a vast pair of world maps, carefully carved into its lower stone façade, reflecting a commitment to expanding the worldwide reach of the LDS faith.

This study contains long and interesting chapters highlighting singular maps and their makers. The maps of the City of Zion, once attributed as a divine revelation given to Joseph Smith, appear as plans that changed in significant ways, especially with contributions from the cartographer-artist Frederick Williams, and the evolving maps, going from “plan” to “practice,” are discussed at length in chapter one. That plan would offer a basic blueprint for the layout and design of many a “four-square” Mormon town. An early plat map, proposed as a design for Salt Lake City and drafted by Thomas Bullock, was compiled a mere three weeks after the initial Mormon arrival in Utah in 1847 (81).

A separate chapter discusses at length the work of James H. Martineau, expanding Francaviglia’s previous thought on this subject. Maps from non-Mormons find their place too, including the deservedly famous 1878 “Map of the Utah Territory: Representing the Extent of the Irrigable, Timber, and Pasture Lands,” produced as a part of John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Lands of the Arid Region (120). Many of the reproductions come from the stunningly detailed scanned maps in David Rumsey’s extraordinary collection, much of which Rumsey has placed online, offering the most accessible archive available of western cartographic materials (and free of charge); Francaviglia rightly thanks Rumsey at length for his contributions to all students of cartography. The variety is bracing: reproduced in this book are manuscript maps, Government Printing Office maps, LDS church archives maps, and artifactual maps, including a fine reproduction of one of the Iosepa petroglyphs—which may or may not be a map but certainly provides food for thought.

In a well-crafted afterword, Francaviglia discusses that potential plague of the researcher-author—competing volumes that appear in print while you are winding up your own work. In his case, that was a 2012 second edition of Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History. Francaviglia worked around an interesting and potentially awkward turn of events and even wrote his own generous review of the Atlas after it emerged in print. While a huge number of maps appear in the other volume, Francaviglia points out that few come from the church archives, noting that continuing and sometimes conflicting revelations are always relevant. He suggests that the books be used side by side rather than in competition, and that advice seems sage enough.

Ultimately, Mapmakers of New Zion is as much about cartographic history (fundamentally, a branch of scholarly geography) as it is about Mormonism. This is a thoroughgoing look at how maps reveal ideas and ideals and at the people who craft them, and it offers an absorbing discussion of Mormon practice. In 2009, I published a long essay in the Geographical Review that I titled “Meetinghouses in the Mormon Mind: Ideology, Architecture, and Turbulent Streams of an Expanding Church.” I most certainly would have loved to have had this study by Richard Francaviglia beside me as I worked through my notes. He provides us with quite the legacy.

— PAUL F. STARRS University of Nevada, Reno